


And now it's hard to breathe

by Write_like_an_American



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: At least Aleta loves him, Background Relationships, Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Challenge Response, Drug Use, Dysfunctional Family, Family, Family Drama, Family Feels, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Graphic Space Exposure, Slavery, Smoking, Stakar being a sort-of good dad, Team as Family, UST, Underage Smoking, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, canon-typical child abuse, he tried, vaguely, warning: this will not be a fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-20 08:18:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14256783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Write_like_an_American/pseuds/Write_like_an_American
Summary: “Don’t hold your breath, son.”The life and times of Yondu Udonta, as told through every breath, held or otherwise.





	And now it's hard to breathe

**Author's Note:**

> **One of two pieces written for the Rookerstash Songfic Challenge. This one is inspired by Jax Jones's _Breathe_.**  
>   
> 
> **You're my discretional sin**
> 
> **I feel you on me when I touch my skin**
> 
> **You got me hooked and you're reelin' me in**
> 
> **And I look in your eyes, I'm on the edge**
> 
>  
> 
> **You're on my mind like a song that I can't escape**
> 
> **I don't know how many da-da-dums I can take**
> 
> **I need to know if you're feeling, feeling the same**
> 
> **Is it too late?**
> 
>  
> 
> **But now it's hard to breathe**
> 
> **I'm not in love, it's just a game we do**
> 
> **I tell myself I'm not that into you**
> 
> **But I don't wanna sleep, it's quarter after three**

“Don’t hold your breath, son.”

His warm palm cups Yondu’s nape. He wears gloves, but the heat of his skin seeps through them, and the leather is so supple and soft that it might as well be flesh.

“You’re going to want to, but you mustn’t.”

His breath smells. Not like Yondu’s does – sour blood and rancid meat, because his rotten tooth-nubs hurt when he tries to chew on corpses not yet softened by bloat. But there’s a scent to it. Something bitter-sharp, barbed as battlefield air that's soused in smoke and plasma.

Yondu knows it. He tries to place it, frowning, inhaling deeper, studying the infidel’s lips as if the missing clue might be there, encoded, inscribed in the chaps.

“No,” insists the infidel. The gloved hand crushes his shoulder. “Breathe out. You need to empty your lungs, or hard-vac will do it for you. Do you understand? Boy, do you understand me? Stars, if you don’t have a translator chip…”

Yondu does. But Master says he mustn't talk to infidels, so he doesn't reply.

A beep from the control pad. Shapes flash – sigils in Kree. Yondu might have a basic translator, calibrated for Kree and Common, but he ain’t never been taught to read, and no amount of circuitry in his brain will make up for it.

He watches the infidel instead. The big man boggles at the squiggles. There’s four of them - the furthest on the right fluctuates far too rapidly to be seen, while the next along keeps pace with Yondu’s frantic heart.

The man wastes a moment spitting cusses in a heathen cant. Then he spins Yondu to face him, gaze pouring frantically into his.

“ _D’thzkak’zor_! Son? Son? Breathe out – the airlock’s opening in ten seconds. I can’t stop it – the intel’s fucked, the override codes ain’t… Aw hell. Breathe out, son! Breathe out now! ”

No time to think. No time to feel the betrayal, the horror that Master would do this to him. He’s been given a direct order. While it comes from the mouth of an infidel, Yondu still follows it, and not a moment too soon.

Whoosh. Suck. Silence.

They bowl over one another. Ain’t the most elegant entry into the frigid, star-spangled abyss. They clonk and tangle, the infidel bundling him in a harness of arms.

From a distance – point-five kliks, to be precise – their arms and legs merge together. They're a chimera, another bastard son of Loki, sporting four limbs too many. Look closer though, and you’ll see them for what they are.

Mortals. A man and a boy clasped together, suffocating and freezing and burning and dying and puffing with dropsy. The far-off supergiant cooks one half of their bodies, while liquid, boiled to the surface of their skin, frosts the rest in oily rime.

Aleta toys with her joystick, pointed chin propped on her palm.

“Idiot,” she says, but it’s not without fondness. “How many times do I have to tell you to stop picking up strays?”

The comm stays silent. Stakar is too busy dying to reply.

Point-five kliks becomes point-four, then point-three and point-two in rapid succession. Then she cranks on the tractor beam and pulls ‘em back from space’s hostile embrace to thaw in her ship’s fusty womb.

That’s how Yondu learns three very important lessons. Firstly, that space exposure sucks balls. Secondly, that ten seconds in hard-vac will knock you unconscious but it takes a minute to kill you. And thirdly, he learns that if the breach klaxons wail and the walls buckle out, you must never hold your breath.

 

* * *

 

 

 _Shiiko_ sweets. That’s it – the source of the infidel’s varnish-sharp breath.

Hard gums cut into novelty shapes. They’re designed to be sucked during atmospheric re-entry, marketed at adults because the sour zap shoots up your sinuses like you’ve licked a battery pod. While they boast some mild anti-rad properties, it ain’t enough to heal the burns on his back.

The infidel offers him one anyway, as they sit in Decontami'.

“It’s okay,” he croaks, at Yondu’s dubious look. “It’s only as irradiated as the rest of us.”

Yondu ain’t worried about the rad-poisoning – not like he has hair to lose. He looks at the sweet, balanced on the infidel’s finger.

The man’s skin is white – too white, like the close-capped fungi clusters that squatted in the corners of the slave pens when Master forgot to hose them down. He’s peeled off his gloves to examine the basted meat of his hands. There the flesh runs lobster red, red like Kree blood rather than that of the heretical Xandarian race.

The sweet, at least, is familiar. When Yondu lets his lashes drift over his eyes, the toxic green lozenge is all he can see.

Master used to chew them after Accuser-rites, to wash out the blood. That’s why Yondu associates the smell with comfort. Nothing mellowed Master more than crushing infidel skulls.

Despite the burst capillaries in his eyes and the tremble in his outstretched hand, something tells Yondu this infidel won’t go down easy.

He ignores the sweet until the infidel sighs, dropping it back into the packet. Yondu hunches his shoulders. He’ll be hit, of course. It’s only a matter of when.

When the hand speeds towards him, he sullenly locks every limb. He won't give the infidel the satisfaction of a flinch. But the palm lands on his shoulder, imparting another warm squeeze.

“Well done, boy,” says the infidel. His voice is oil-smoke and husk, the crunch of empty plas-casings under a boot. “You survived. You done good.”

He sheds hair like he’s losing his winter coat. Sunburn peels from his temples, radiation-raw and oozing. His half-baked, still-swollen face looks all kinds of ridiculous – not that Yondu will be winning any pageants. His skin stretches too tight, like it might crack if he smiles.

The infidel grins regardless. “You done good,” he says again.

Yondu swallows. If he ain’t supposed to speak to infidels, he certainly shouldn’t take their compliments. Master would be pissed.

But Master ain't here now. When Yondu bundled the infidel into an airlock and broke the door mechanism so he couldn’t escape, rather than taking him into custody Master chose to vent them both and be done with it. In Master’s eyes, he’s dead – another number ticked off the tally, a death-mongering asset lost to the churn of war.

Perhaps, thinks Yondu as the decontamination shower dumps a mountain of anti-rad foam over each of their heads, just perhaps, the old rules don’t apply.

 

* * *

 

 

Ten years later, Stakar stands with his fists knotted in Yondu’s collar, breathing _shiiko-_ tart air on his face. They’re in the Captains’ Chambers, the big donut-shaped room that rings the engine nucleus. The engine itself whirls away in the corner of Yondu’s eye, a tourbillon of glittering, glassy blue lights. It spins and it flips and it flips and it spins, and Yondu’s stomach does the same, heaving inside him like it’s trying to escape.

No chance of that though. There’s no running away from this - not until he’s pushed.

“Exile,” Stakar says. He sounds mighty sad about it too.

His fingers untangle slow from Yondu’s coat. Yondu ain’t that hick of a slave kid who shrinks into himself whenever a hand is raised, not anymore. Right now, he wants Stakar to force the confrontation, plant those big fists of his right into Yondu’s face so Yondu can hit him back, so they can flounder furiously at each other for as long as it takes to put all this behind them.

But you can’t just forget a hundred dead kids (and that word still echoes through Yondu’s brain, louder and louder, _dead-dead-dead-dead-DEAD._ ) There’s no rug large enough to sweep them under; no closet deep enough to hide the skeletons.

Yondu knows it. So as Stakar backs away, taking his sour breath and those unswung punches with him, Yondu also knows that this is the end.

He’s right, of course. This _is_ the end - or at least, the beginning of it. But as Stakar lets him decide whether to walk to the airlock or be dragged, he has a choice to make. Either let the end come quickly, or let it creep up on him slow.

The warning lights flash. Yondu knows his numerals now, just about - enough to recognize the countdown. He knuckles the little egg of the spacemask, where it clips to the back of his ear. Stakar forked out for it, way-way back. Told him to keep it on him at all times.

 _Ten_ , the timer proclaims. _Nine._

Yondu wonders whether he ought to leave the spacemask here, a final act of rebellion.

_Eight._

Yondu wonders whether he ought to hold his breath.

_Seven. Six._

Yondu thinks of all those damn kids, squeezing his eyes shut so tight he has an excuse for the sting in the corners.

_Five. Four._

Yondu thinks of the coordinates Ego pinged him cycle before last. Species: Terran; mother: deceased. Eight Annuals of age. Name…

_Three. Two._

Peter Jason Quill.

_One._

Yondu activates the space mask, and breathes.

 

* * *

 

 

He crushes the damn thing later. Of course he does, soon as he’s back on his own galleon, relaying the verdict to his grim-faced crew. Takes it off there and then, stomps it to sparking powder beneath his boot, grinds his heel in until it shrieks against the metal.

“Don’t need Ogord,” he pants, glaring up at them, one by one. “Don’t need _none_ of those bastards. We’s gonna make our own way, with our own rules, our own stars-damned Code. We still got our territory. We still got our wits, an’ our plas-pistols, an’ _this._ ”

He pats his arrow. That’s one gift from Stakar that he _won’t_ rescind. Despite the hypocrisy, he can see that his men are starting to believe him, starting to pray they have a chance. Must be nice for them.

But Yondu can’t worry about what’s coming. There’s a little Terran kid out there in need of kidnapping, and seeing as that’s the only skill left on Yondu’s resume, he figures he’d better get on with it.

 

* * *

 

 

“But what do I  _do?_ ”

This whole mess with Jork’s got the Quill brat agitated. When the Quill brat gets agitated, he fiddles with his Walkthing non-stop, popping the plastic tabs in-out, in-out, rewind and fast-forward, the headphones around his neck spitting aborted snatches of song.

When the Quill brat gets agitated, the crew soon tire of his twitching. The probability that Yondu will wake up one morning to find him swimming face-down in a water tank increases. Ergo, when the Quill brat gets agitated, Yondu’s gotta pull his thumb out his ass and  _do something about it._

“What’chu mean, boy,” he grunts. He’s engrossed in that ancient and respectable old Ravager tradition of testing one’s huffer-root tolerance after a funeral. Slouched this far down on his chair, he can’t see the fireworks.

Small fireworks, shitty ones. Practically penny candles. That Ogord bastard thought this exile out, blacklisting him with every major supplier so all he can get his mitts on is cheap sparkle-powder and enough moonshine to knock out his crew once the show’s over and they’ve snipped Jork’s hoar-patterned leathers into the tailor’s bucket. Might be enough to stop a mutiny, this time around.

If it ain’t, they’re fucked. Yondu’s way too smoked-out to think straight, let alone whistle. That’s the only reason he lets Quill blather on so long.

“And – and, I’m just a lil’ freaked out, okay! I mean, don’t get me wrong. I always wanted to go to space when I was a kid…”

Quill, at the grand old age of twelve, is still very much one. But he’s been flying an M-ship two years now, and has all sorts of hoity-toity ideas about how having ‘Ravager mascot’ listed beside his name in the rosters makes him eligible for full-pay. That ain’t an argument Yondu wants to have though. Not today.

He’s drifted. When he zones back in, Quill’s finally approaching his point:

“…But I saw him out there! It just – it all came out of his mouth! The blood! Yondu, there was so much blood.”

It takes a moment for Yondu to recall the topic of their conversation. Jork. That was it. Dumbass Kylorian managed to get himself vented. Complete accident – no one’s fault (except Yondu’s, who could’ve repaired that airlock the moment one of his men reported frosting on the inside of the rubber. Ain't the money in the kitty though. Ain't ever any money, not anymore.)

His brother, Oblo, yodels on a deck far below. The song echoes along rust-crusted pipes, notes dissolving into one another. The chorus rolls like a moon-pulled wave. It’s either got a helluva lot of verses, else the boy’s forgot the rest of the words and is whimpering the same refrain over and over like Quill’s Walkthing when it gets stuck on repeat.

That ain’t happened since Yondu scraped his coffers for enough glint to get the damn thing space-proofed, donating coins to that cause that could’ve gone into emergency spacemasks or patches on airlocks. Stars, if he don’t regret it now.

Click, click, click. Peter pops the clear plastic lid off his tapedeck and pats it back into place.

Yondu sighs. The smoke curls hot and berry-sharp along his tongue. It’s cut with  _shiiko_ , the stuff he always chops into the herb when he doesn’t want to remember shit but also can’t bear to forget.

“I dunno what you want from me, boy.”

Peter’s nose crinkles. When Yondu blows smoke at his face, he flaps his hand and coughs. Still takes the drag when Yondu offers it though – silly little whippet, always yapping about proving himself a man.

Being a man ain’t determined by your ability to ingest huffer-root without vomiting, but it helps. Yondu chuckles at the dry-heaves, Quill half-collapsed and wheezing on the chair arm.

“C’mon now, boyo. This here’s good for ya. Keeps yer mind sharp, yer finger on the pulse of everything what's  _real_.”

Quill recovers with a last phlegmy hack. He casts a dubious eye over his captain: a crumpled mound of leather, filling his chair like a cat in a flask. “You don’t look all that sharp to me. I’ll go ask Tullk.”

That needles. Yondu champs his cheroot. Planting his palms flat on the chair arms, he heaves himself to a generous upright.

The Bridge is deserted. The rabble are occupied keeping Oblo company, or raiding the demijohns in the bilges, full of moonshine distilled from old galley stock and engine coolant that they think he doesn’t know about.

The skilled men – them who Yondu trusts to watch the navigation plinths without spinning them through a black hole at hyperspeed – shamble about below-decks, prepping the galleon for night shift. Checking engine gauges, vent pressure in the ducts, shooing Orloni away from the more fragile cables around the camera core. That sorta shit.

Tullk oversees them. Man’s too wise to want the first mate post, so Yondu dolloped it on Kraglin instead: a clever bird-eyed Hraxian from the colonies, space-born judging by the lanky stretch of his bones. He’s smart when it comes to haggling and wily as hell in a skirmish, and he stares at Yondu’s ass like the sun shines out of it, which don’t hurt.

Point is: anything Tullk can handle, cap’n can. Even inebriated, even with smoke swirling about his brainpan and muddying the corners. He's got this.

“Tell me,” he says imperiously. Quill rolls his eyes. He earns himself a cuff to the ear – although Yondu misses, and pretends he meant to slap his face all along.

“Ow! Hell, I just did!”

He flinches when Yondu raises his palm again (flat out; he don’t ball punches unless he’s whupping the brat in the ring, because he don’t call non-blues  _infidel_ anymore and he likes to think he’s better than them what owned him).

“Okay, okay. I’m asking – what the hell’m I supposed to do? Y’know, if I open a broken airlock? Am I just gonna  _die?_  Go the same way as…” He trails off, playing with the squishy foam pad of his headphone. Aw. Dang brat can’t even say his name.

“Here’s a tip.” Yondu leans forwards, balancing the cigar on his knuckles. The end smoulders, a vermilion eye, and the acid-green flecks of  _shiiko_ drift gently down. “  _Don’t open broken airlocks._ ”

Quill crosses his arms. “That don’t do me much good.”

“Didn’t do Jork much good neither.”

Quill’s mouth is a line. “I don’t like you when you smoke.”

Yondu taps ash down the arm of his coat. A little falls into his sleeve, but he welcomes the burn: nibbling on his skin like needle-teeth. “I don’t much like you anyways, so we’s even. But boy…”

He flashes back to a thick hand on his shoulder, spinning him like a top. Stakar’s shaking as he demanded that Yondu breathe out. The burp of air and men into pure, empty nothingness.

He owes Quill a lot. A debt deeper than he can ever repay. It's shaped like a hundred dead siblings, give or take. Teaching the brat to shoot don’t come close to breaking even, nor smacking him about so he knows what to expect from the galaxy at large.

But it’s the best he’s got.

“Boss?” Quill waggles fingers in front of his face. “You kinda trailed off mid-sentence there.”

“Breathe out,” says Yondu, hoarse. Quill eyes the cheroot, fighting down another cough.

“Will that stop me puking?”

“What? No.” Yondu stubs it out, mashing it on his leg. Bonus of treated leather – he don’t feel the heat. “Kid, breathe out if yer ever gonna find yerself stuck in space with no suit. Stops yer lungs being ripped out yer chest. Still die pretty damn quick, but at least that way ya fall unconscious first. An’ it’ll give me a chance to swoop in an’ catch yer dumb ass.”

Quill scoffs. “Like you’d do that. Fall behind, get left behind, right?” But hope glimmers in his eyes, and just this once, Yondu can’t bring himself to crush it.

“Unconscious in ten seconds, dead in a minute,” he tells him. “Brain starts dyin’ after four, so there ain’t no point revivin’ ya after that, unless ya wanna get Thanos involved. But boy…”

This time, when he catches Peter’s head in the broad paw of his hand, it ain’t to hurt, or even chastise. He pulls him in, Yondu seated and Quill standing, both of a height. Their foreheads bump, peach on blue.

“If ya find yerself in that airlock,” he tells him, holding him there with ginger hair threading through the splits in his nails, “ya comm me yer coordinates, an’ don’t’chu ever hold your breath. Empty yer lungs. Like this.”

He blows out in demonstration. One, two, three, four, five. He breathes until his lungs burn and his cheeks cave, hollowing on his tongue. When he can’t hold it no longer, he lets Quill go.

“Now you try.”

Quill retreats out of grabbing distance. “Your breath stinks, boss. Worse when you smoke. I’m going to bed.”

“Suit yerself.” If the boy don’t want to cherish his wisdom, Yondu ain’t gonna spoonfeed him. He subsides sulkily on his seat, fumbling a knee up to his chest and wrapping an arm around it. “Jus’ remember what I told ya. Call me. Ten seconds. One minute, four minutes. Breathe out.”

But Quill’s already dropped his headphones on, a cocoon of sound within which he’s untouchable. The door slinks closed behind him.

Yondu thinks of all the times he’s told the boy to listen to his music and face the wall – executing mutineers, staving off the numbness with a two-chit bot, that one time they got caught in Kree-space without warranty and one of the arresting officers recognized the slave-hatch on the side of Yondu’s face, decided to teach him a little lesson.

It’s good Quill’s got something that makes him feel safe. But that doesn't stop a part of Yondu snarling for him to rip that damn song-box away, crush it underfoot, eject it from the vents to teach Quill that  _safe_ ain’t nothing but a farce.

If he tosses the Walkthing out the airlock, Quill will follow it. He'll dive into hard-vac after the ghost of his mama, whining that he never held her hand.

Most likely, he won't remember Yondu’s advice.

The dead cheroot rests on his thigh. The dead man floats in space. Yondu nods off there, limpened by the huffer, and prays that’s one comm-call he never receives.

 

* * *

 

Fate ain’t so kind. Yondu does receive that call, though it ain’t for decades hence.

“ Yondu!  _Yon-du!_ My coordinates are 52K6431! Come get me!”

Damn  _brat._

He bought Quill that space mask after one night too many spent imagining those freckles contorted around an airless scream. Now the little shit squanders it on some green chick who ain’t never cooked him a meal nor – to Yondu’s knowledge – fellatiated his piece. Go fuckin’ figure.

Yondu stomps onto the  _Eclector_ bridge _._ He gunned back to the galleon the moment Quill stole one of the nippy dockside junker-pods, figuring it’d be easier for everyone if he set up an ambush. He’s too damn old to scamper about after the brat nowadays. Save that for a man whose knees don’t creak in solar flares, when the compass dials spin haywire and every rivet aboard judders in their sockets like they might ping loose.

Yondu glances around. His bridge crew stand in tableau, a freeze-frame of whiskers and grease and unpopped zits.

This is untrodden ground. Quill’s had his wanders; uncoupled his bird in the dead of night shift and zoomed for the nearest settlement, claiming he’s sick of being treated like a kid, that he’s Star-lord and he’s ready to take on the galaxy. Usually, soon as they find the empty berth, Yondu starts the betting pool. So far the kid has yet to exceed a Lunar. Then he chugs back, sulky and sullen, dings in his chassis and a scowl on his hairy pink mug, stomaching the hoots and jibes and Yondu’s welcome-home punch.

But he ain’t never nabbed a prize from under their noses before. Ravager steal from everyone, but not each other. He ain’t never broken Code.

He certainly never shanghaied a crew of his own. Much less a crew he would lay down his life for.

Yondu stamps; the hollow floor booms like a clanger hitting a bell.

“ What'chu waitin' for? Turn this ship around! Look lively, ya scum-suckin' maggots, or the rest of ya can join him out there!”

Cap'n's orders is cap'n's orders. Quill might’ve broken Code, but if Yondu says they're to haul him back alive, they'll obey. It’s that or lay their own necks on the chopping block.

Still, Yondu dispatches Kraglin, just to make sure no plas-charges find their way into Quill’s fool skull. Obfonteri glowers at him something rotten when he reiterates the no-harm order. At least he keeps his gripes in the comfort of his head. An earful awaits Yondu once they're alone in their cabin, but so long as Kraglin don’t question him in front of crew, Yondu don’t have to make an example.

He doesn’t follow the little band as they stalk to the airlock to see what’s left of their errant crewmate. Ain’t no reason to. Either Quill’s dead or he ain’t, but either way Yondu can’t see him just yet.

He don’t know what he’ll do. Punch him? Whistle? Offer the little shit the  _shiiko_ sweet in his pocket, like another man did for him, so many years ago? Or will he break down over his corpse, in front of all his men, and berate a sack of ice-slick meat for holding its breath?

Yondu only realizes he’s doing the same when his head starts to swirl, static fizzing at the corners of his vision.

“ Damn you, boy,” he whispers, quiet enough that only Tullk, managing their engine output, can hear. “Be the death of me yet.”

But Quill ain’t Yondu’s death, nor his own. Kraglin frogmarches him onto the Bridge, eking some sadistic joy from stabbing him in the back with a plas-pistol. The charge ain’t high, but it’s enough to make Peter writhe, and the green chick lunges at Kraglin as if she’d like to get his knobbly neck between her teeth.

Shit. Yondu recognizes her now. Not by name, but by rep.

Daughter of Thanos.

The hell sort of company is Quill keeping?

But she ain’t crew, so Yondu don’t got shits to give. He looks at Quill instead. His boy – or as close as anyone’ll come.

Any regular mortal'd be suffering right now. Frost scarring on their eyeballs, burns on whatever part was turned to the nearest star, irradiated and swollen and in dire need of Decontami’. These two hardly notice. Quill shakes off the ice without so much as a shiver. Girlie ain't too far behind. Both of them were far too smart to hold their breaths.

Yondu releases his. He claps his hands, flips his trench coat back off his arrow, and summons a devilish grin.

 

* * *

 

 

Next time Yondu forgets how to breathe, three of his least favorite things – Kree fanatics, Infinity Stones, and the very real possibility that Peter Quill might die – are conspiring to fuck up his day.

Kraglin catches his sleeve before he can stomp into the violet tornado and drag Quill out by the ear. He don’t say shit. Just looks at Yondu, nibbling daintily on his lip.

His face is slathered in soot and sweat. Slyphs flurry around the  _Dark Aster_. The purple lights glint off the silver stubble at Kraglin’s temples, fill the bucket-deep bruises under his eyes. Yondu ain’t the only one getting old.

Last Yondu saw of Kraglin before this, he was having a whale of a time: gunning down Sakaarans as they dive-bombed the city, a big yellow grin on his face. Until this moment, when he materializes at Yondu’s side, he ain’t real to him – could be living, could be dead.

Yondu’s glad he survived. For a moment, he almost wants to say so – but that ain’t the way they do things, him and Krags.

Anyway, Quill’s in there, buried in the volcanic broil of dust and lightning and eldritch energy. Most likely he drops the stone and they all perish. Consumed, engulfed, the planet turning to hellfire beneath their boots.

Yondu glances at the civilians. A small throng gathers beside their city's bombed-out shell, wailing and mourning and clutching their young, whether they’re alive or otherwise. Yondu just prays he dies before the smoke clears and he has to see Quill’s ashes.

His heart thunders in his ears. His face is too hot; his eyes itch from more than the smoke. He pulls at his scarf, the one that’s hidden the band of scars around his throat since the day he started ferrying curious whelps with poking fingers and too many uncomfortable questions, and he doesn’t realize why his fingers are quivering until Kraglin grips his wrist a little tighter and whispers  _breathe, sir. Breathe._

Yondu does. The air tastes hot and sour. Smuts scour his nostrils and prickle on his tongue. Like licking embers, sucking on charcoal.

Kraglin lets go as the survivors straggle up the ridge, scree crunching under their boots. They’re all charred to various degrees, but a headcount reveals they still have the numbers to form a viable skeleton crew, steer the galleon back into No Man’s Space, beyond Empire jurisdiction.

Yondu don’t care. He ought to, but he don’t. He can’t. It’s all a blur, and each breath is more ragged than the last.

He staggers down the slope, into the crater. It’s a perilous-steep incline, and each step collapses more of the fragile dirt, rocky splinters running like shards in a glass sand dune. They slice his hands when he steadies himself, cutting the back of his trenchcoat to ribbons.

“ Cap’n,” Kraglin calls. Yondu doesn’t hear. “Dammit! Hell, he uh, must be real set on gettin’ that orb.”

Thanos can stick the orb on his throne and sit on it, for all Yondu cares.

But then the whirlwind dissipates. The Kree bursts like a puff of dust through the vents during the Ravager’s once-per-deca-annual ship-wide spring clean. Hooray, huzzah, the Guardians saved the day.

Quill stands there, orb in hand. Dead skin clings to his cheeks. He sports a number of raw-peeled wounds, but ain’t none of them deep. More like grazes, as if Yondu’s finally made good on his threats to keel haul him, see how many of the parasitic deepspace barnacles he can scratch off with that weedy moustache.

Yondu chortles. It blares rudely across the battlefield, making the civilians flinch. When Quill spots him striding forwards, he touches the spare containment sphere strapped to his belt.

Yondu locks eyes on it. Then away again, before Quill thinks he’s made.

Some comment about nookie-nookie later that Yondu thinks is the height of comedy, and their frigate peels off the black-scorched earth. Yondu stands with his forearm against the window, soaking up the chill of the glass. The false orb rests snug in his palm.

It’s still a little warm from where Quill held it, sweating as he pulled his last con on the man who raised him. Did a mighty fine job of it, too. Looked Yondu dead in the eyes. Even had the gall to tell him not to open it.

Smart-mouthed little shit.

Kraglin lurks behind him, almost close enough to loop an arm around his waist and rest his pointy chin on his shoulder. Doesn’t though – not even in the exhilaration of victory. Ain’t like that between the two of them. No matter how much either one thinks about it as they lay on opposite sides of the bed they share, in wait of a shinier tomorrow.

Kraglin must reckon that shinier tomorrow’s arrived. He’s all jitter and sharp grins and sadistic glee, and Yondu knows that whichever bot he buys tonight, Kraglin’ll book it out straight after.

“ Quill turned out alright,” he yells to Yondu over the roar as their thrusters ignite, shooting them up fast enough to puncture atmosphere. The great weight of acceleration piles on top of them, bowing Kraglin’s spindly knees and squashing the air from their lungs.

Yondu manages a heartfelt “Good thing we didn’t drop him off with his dad like we was supposed to,” before the solar shutters slide down, cutting off all natural light so that when they burst out into the aether, they ain’t blinded by Xandar's suns.

 

* * *

 

 

Cap’n and mate share quarters. It ain’t an old Ravager tradition, although that’s what Yondu flogs it as to his men. To Kraglin too. Tells him it’s strictly professional, to have someone you trust to watch your back sleep against it.

Lie. Ain’t about that. Ain’t about that at all. It’s about warmth and contact and the fuzz of Kraglin’s breath on his pierced earlobe when the man rolls in the night.

Yondu’s a sly bastard, you see. He knows Kraglin’s natural inclination is to tuck up on his left – just like he knows the gobshite’s too shy to say as much when Yondu declares governance over that side of the bed. He faces the wall, forcing his long string-bean of a mate to mirror him. He pretends he can’t hear the passive-aggressive shuffling as Kraglin makes himself comfortable.

Then gradually, once that beaky nose is honking like a randy  _shkor-_ frog, Yondu inch-worms for the dent in the middle of the mattress. It’s the evidence of their crimes: a crevasse of crushed stuffing that the pair of them pour into all-too-easily, like the chalk outline around a homicide on one of Quill’s Terran move-ies.

Yondu breathes in.  _Shiiko_ -smoke, eggy farts, sweat and halitosis and old fishy piss from the last time Kraglin got tasered – which happens to be more recent than the last time he washed his leathers.

Home.

Yondu snuggles down and waits.

It happens slowly, inevitably, sure as the spin of a comet around a star. Kraglin migrates. He hooks an arm over Yondu’s waist, knees nudging behind his captain’s. That gangly eel of a body conforms to Yondu’s back. He nuzzles his collar scar with every lip-smacking, snuffly snore.

Yondu pretends to be deep out, as usual. He doesn’t need much sleep – or at least, he doesn’t get much, and it ain’t killed him yet.

Better insomnia than the alternative. In his dreams, Quill’s still there, still smiling, sometimes with Stakar by his side. Yondu don’t need that. It’s hard enough getting out of bed in the morning as it is.

Kraglin’s thin arm flexes. He’s inescapable, a sinewy bushbaby with god-awful breath. Sometimes that little rub of friction excites him, but it don’t never come to anything, even if Yondu lies hyper-aware of the heat and the pressure and thinks about how he’d let Kraglin fuck him, if he’d only hold him after.

Don’t matter though. As far as Kraglin knows, Yondu only fucks bots, and he’s a very deep sleeper.

Yondu feigns louder snores than usual on those mornings. He always gives Kraglin the chance to wake first, notice his predicament and cuss himself out before staggering for the bathroom or reinstating the professional foot between them while every fiber in Yondu’s body wails at its loss.

And life goes on and Quill don’t come back, and Yondu smokes more  _shiiko_ than he should until his hands tremble from it and his eyes bleed blue. The Zune that Yondu found at a skeezy Knowhere souk sits on his table, the selection wheel smoothed from the amount of times Yondu’s rubbed his thumb around it and never once hit play.

Kraglin ain’t happy. None of them are, now their barrel doesn’t need  _scraping_ anymore so much as  _cutting open so they can lick at whatever juices soaked the tar_ \- but Kraglin is least happy of the lot.

During the night shift, the space between them grows and grows, until one night Yondu drifts uneasily off with no knife-thin body beside him, and wakes, unmolested, in much the same way.

Neither he nor Kraglin bring it up in the morning. But Kraglin don’t come back, kipping down in crew quarters, in one of the many empty beds. Apparently, he’d rather sleep with spiders and orloni than his cap’n.

He addresses Yondu with cold civility. Every time Quill’s name crops up in conversation, no matter how much fury Yondu injects into his tone, Kraglin glares at his boots and his shoulders migrate a little closer to his ears.

So Yondu lays alone on his bed. He’s smoked five cheroots already so he sucks on his last unlit,  _shiiko_ staining his tongue. He plops the buds of the zune into his ears, dirty boots crossed on the pelts, and, for the first time, he listens to  _Father and Son._

 

* * *

 

 

Contraxia. Three bots and no satisfaction. His boots squelch in the snow.

_Don’t hold your breath, son._

It’s okay. When Stakar walks away from him, Yondu’s lungs stop working of their own accord.

 

* * *

 

 

Below them, Ego burns. The relics of Yondu’s sin burn with him.

Bones, so many bones. He saw ‘em, as they flew into the planet’s core. Snapped twigs, brittle and white-bleached, piled in a cairn.

So many of them – too many, logic insists, to account for the brats he took by the nose and led, one by one, to their deaths.

That don’t matter. Ego splits in a bleak black maw, and the bones shiver away into oblivion. Each little femur, each tiny pile of toes, the inner ear bones that rattle around skulls like dried peas in maracas…

Yondu can’t turn to watch their final moments. He’s got his own to worry about.

Their ghosts pull on his tattered coat tails, wrap his ankles in frigid clingfilm. But Quill’s in his arms, solid and warm and real.

Below them is fire, and above them is night. They fly through a stunning aurora, parting the psychedelic billows, skittery lights playing leapfrog over the hairs on Quill’s head. Yondu don’t pause to take in the view. He watches Quill’s face, ingraining it all in his mind.

The bow of his shock-parted lips, every last sprig of stubble. Yondu’s blue where it reflects from his soft wet eyes. The little laughter lines left by his friends, and the scowl lines for which Yondu can take credit.

An entire life engraved on a face; the reminder that not everything he touched turns to rust.

Yondu looks at his boy, and he sees that Peter’s good. And if he came from him, survived because of him, it means there’s a little good in Yondu too.

He cups his face between his palms. For once, he ain’t trying to mould him, make him something he’s not. Just holding him as he cries, holding him as he should’ve done a thousand times before.

Yondu doesn’t hold his breath. It doesn’t matter, in the end.

**Author's Note:**

> **Thank you so much to Rookerstash for creating this challenge! And thanks to every person who clicks that kudos button, and/or leaves a comment. I love you all. MEGA thanks to Polaris, Havicat and Brigdh for giving this a beta-read! It wouldn't be the same fic without you guys, and frankly, you gave me the confidence to post this. Bless you. x**


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